The reason that I decided to make a screencast showing the out-of-the-box SEO abilities of SilverStripe is that it has so much built in that you don’t need to hack or add a million plugins to get a good foundation for writing SEO strong content. In fact, no other CMS comes to mind with quite this amount of custom ability built in directly. Oh sure, other platforms give you custom fields or plugins that you can code up to work to help SEO, but I wanted to show you what this system can do from the start.

As I mention in the video, I’ll have to make a couple of additional screencasts to really showcase a few other major features of this system because this video just hits the tip of the iceberg.

Video notes: Having been in a semi-retirement, I have not made a screencast in a long time, so bear with me on having the volume be a bit up and down at times. I’ll get back in the swing of it soon enough. I did figure out how to make it for HD, and I strongly recommend that you view the screencast in HD so that you can see the screen clearly.

I’m embedding it here just in case you really don’t feel like clicking one link and watching the HD version, but you’ll want to view it at full screen and it will be a touch blurry.

Hopefully you enjoy the screencast, and if you have more questions or thought of some features of this software you’d like me to mention in a future screencast, let me know! I have 2 more overview videos planned and several tutorials but I’m open to more ideas.

FYI “$MetaTags(false)” still shows $MetaTags. However the (false) just excludes the $MetaTitle, which is a little magic. (You might expect that it doesn’t show $MetaTags at all, but this is not the case.)

We personally prefer “page title – site name” order rather than “site name – page title” because your browser history lists are generally more human readable. If the phase is long, the right hand gets chopped off, and we’d rather not chop off page title. It’s a small thing.

So, out of the box in v2.3.1, the default template will work fine (but if you wish to change the order of site-name/page-title, then you can easily update the template, as in this video, and frankly, the whole point of having template freedom is to do these sorts of things.)

Finally, yes, we will in the future support nested aka hierarchical URLS, but you will be able to choose to have this on or off. You’re right, this is a subjective thing. We wouldn’t want to force you one way or the other.

Thanks for dropping by again. I’m glad you enjoyed the video, and I’m glad you corrected me about the MetaTags function and how that works. On the title aspect, I definitely prefer page-name / site-title or just page-name from an SEO perspective. Since you’ve got a limited amount of space where the title of a page shows up in Google search, it’s definitely a good idea to push the content of the specific article into the area search results can see.

I hope that this one and the next couple of screencasts I have planned will work as quick feature overviews to help people see the benefits of SS easily.

Great video. We have used this CMS on the last three projects and the 4th is about to drop. This 4th project will give us a much better idea on SS and its SEO capability as it is over 1000 pages. We are/were a bit concerned about everything being off the base url so I guess we will see if that is really an issue. Keep your fingers crossed!

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